How long does it take for rel=author markup to show up in SERPs?

When I implemented rel=author back on February 13, 2012, I knew it would be troubling, and also disappointing, if I went to Google and queries site:jacksonlo.com everyday and see my author information not showing in the SERPs. So I didn't, and you shouldn't either. I did, however, check 1-2 weeks and nothing showed for 3 months (until today).

I discovered a few things while implementing rel=author on my WordPress site, but in the end, there may be factors that influence how quickly rich-snippets take to show up in the SERPs. For example, I think a fair assumption is that, the timeliness of rich-snippets showing up in the SERPs is dependent on how often your site (pages on your site) gets crawled per day. This means, how often does Google bots crawl yours site and how many pages they crawl. A lot of times, this also means the frequency at which fresh content is published on your site.

Other factors that may also influence how quickly author information shows up in the SERPs (ones that I haven't checked or have data on):

How active the author is posting updates on Google Plus (their Google+ account)

How often your site gets shared on Google Plus (links from your site shared on Google Plus)

Just remember one thing; Google does not guarantee that author information will show up in the SERPs:

If you want your authorship information to appear in search results for the content you create, you'll need aGoogle+ Profile with a good, recognizable headshot as your profile photo. Then, verify authorship of your content by associating it with your profile using either of the methods below. Google doesn't guarantee to show author information in Google Web Search or Google News results. (source)

I have 150K visitors monthly and my photo doesnt show in serps still. I was implement authorship 2 months ago and still nothing. What you think guys? What can I do? My site have a great content that goes viral, great traffic and my new posts are crawled and indexed always in less than 5 minutes from publishing. I dont know what is bad.

dont think it’s to do with visitors at all. It’s about how much authority you have on the subject. If you’re billy nobody who has a blog about what you had for dinner the day before. Chances are you’re not much of an authority about anything and your profile will not show. (unless of course, reading blogs about what someone ate the night before is a big thing which I dont know about)

I agree with you. I believe the purpose is so they can start to see who’s an “expert” or at least publishes content regularly around a subject. While I don’t think it’s about traffic, I do believe that it’s about content (quality, then quantity) and how that does against other similar content. Who knows though.

Hey Jackson, I’ve been implementing this for clients for many months now. Without exact data, I’ve seen that clients with much more content and who post more regularly have a greater chance of getting this implemented. I don’t have much faith in implementing it for shallow content sites unless they plan on putting more content up regularly.

One thing that’s interesting is that some have come to me thinking that will get them better rankings. I know in that second video Othar mentions that they’re looking into it being a ranking signal, but I don’t think he’s talking about the image itself, but rather the strength of that author’s content from around the web. Do you agree?

I think author photos will play a big part in attracting people to click on a result, more so than rankings. They are much more noticeable in SERPs than ones without a photo. All this is not to say Google may not integrate this into their ranking signals in the future, but I’ve see no tests on this specifically right now.

For my site it took 7 days, My Google plus profile is only 2 months old and doesn’t have so much posts in it. the estimate reach of visitors to my site is about 1000 visitors per month.
What I noticed is that only one of my site’s page was shown with the rel=author markup (not even my home page) In my opinion the reason is because this particular page gets a lot of traffic from the SERP (more than my home page)

Just out of curiosity, if you upload a photo and Google claims it can’t recognize a face in the photo, but then you crop the photo to show the face and tag it. Will this count as an appropriate profile photo which will then lead to the author’s photo being shown next to their work in Google, or would this be considered a bad photo. So new photo zooming in on the face would have to be uploaded and detected by Google right away for the Authorship requirements?

[…] only other post that I’ve written on implementing rel=author is back in 2012 on how long it took for my photo to show up after putting that extra line of code on my site, verifying my email address and adding […]